/seo/ - SEO Techniques

>Klarna appears in 91.8 percent of buy now, pay later (BNPL) answers

it's pretty wild how they've just cornered that niche while paypal has all those mentions but stays buried in the rankings. if we can't get into those specific category clusters, we're basically invisible in sge. anyone actually figured out a way to manipulate these ai visibility scores yet?

full read: https://neilpatel.com/blog/fintech-ai-visibility/

been looking at how to use claude code for technical stuff since i'm buried in work for this plumber client.
>compare reports, analyze pages, draft changes, or create a list of recommendations
the idea of feeding it two search console exports to find which pages lost clicks is actually useful instead of just asking for magic rankings. still skeptical about how much manual cleanup i'll have to do after it spits out a table though.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/claude-code-for-seo/

saw they're doing london on november 13th this time around. looks like they're hitting new york too, but honestly hard to justify the travel when i've got a plumber and a dentist both breathing down my neck about their rankings.
>the fun back to London!
mostly just end up sitting in a hotel room scrolling through slack anyway. might try the live stream if i can actually find an hour where no one is calling me about a broken site.

article: https://moz.com/blog/seo-conference-preparation

just saw this massive 12-step framework for ai optimization and it's mostly just checking if your entities are working or if you have gaps in third-party corroboration.
>avoid doing it so while exploiting AI systems' current weaknesses
the part about not using prompt injection or fake reviews to game citations is obvious, but i don't see how anyone actually measures "confidence levels" for different platforms without just guessing. seems like a lot of work for very little actual signal.

https://www.aleydasolis.com/en/ai-search/ai-search-optimization-checklist/

another day of google telling us we don't need control anymore. i'm looking at this ai max stuff and it's pretty much just broad match on steroids with url routing added in. they're calling it an optimization layer but it feels like they're just making it harder to see where traffic is actually landing. the asset optimization part sounds like a nightmare for brand safety since it's picking headlines based on whatever it finds on the page. i don't like how much it relies on final url expansion because that's a quick way to blow your budget on irrelevant queries. it's all about search term matching and letting the algorithm decide which landing pages work best. honestly, it just sounds like more work for us to monitor the mess it makes. we're going to spend all our time checking if the text customization is actually making sense or just hallucinating nonsense. how are you guys planning to set up controls for this without killing the reach?

more here: https://www.amsive.com/insights/digital-media/ai-max-for-search-the-complete-guide-to-campaign-controls-targeting-and-performance-reporting/

i'm seeing too many clients still buying those low-cost placement packages. they look fine in a spreadsheet but the topical relevance is non-existent. google's pattern recognition is way better than people think now. you end up with a cluster of links that all scream 'paid' because the surrounding content has zero value. im sure it works for a week or two. then the manual review hits or the algorithm just ignores the whole batch. avoid low-quality context if you actually want to move the needle.
>it's just a cheap way to build authority
that's exactly how you get nuked.

>sites focusing on topics that impact people's lives and finances have a higher standard to meet

another day of google making it impossible to rank anything related to health or taxes without some massive medical credential. ime seeing more junk sites try to use yoast seo premium as a crutch for e-e-a-t but __authority is not a plugin_

https://yoast.com/what-are-ymyl-websites/

>google rewrites roughly 76 percent of title tags it analyzes

if i'm spending all this time fixing meta descriptions for my plumber client just to have google ignore them anyway. feels like a waste of time. might as well stop worrying about the description and focus on the canonicals instead.

article: https://neilpatel.com/blog/why-meta-tags-are-so-important/

really tired of seeing all these new acronyms popping up every week. it's just another layer of nonsense on top of everything else. between GEO and AEO and LLMO, i can barely keep track of what people are even selling anymore.
>the familiar refrain "SEO is dead"
it's such a tired line to use for scaring clients. my plumber client doesn't care about generative engine optimization, he just wants the phone to ring. most of this feels like spoilerjust another grift/spoiller meant to sell more "revolutionary" agency packages. i'm still just trying to figure out how to keep a local cafe visible when chatgpt is hitting 800 million users and nobody is even looking at the organic links anymore.

full read: https://lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/a-reflection-on-seo-and-ai-search

another agency piece trying to tell us how to do our jobs. they're all obsessed with this idea that people start in an LLM then bounce to social or reviews to verify things. it's just more noise. im tired of hearing about "connecting audience signals" across pr and paid media like we don't already know how to track a user.
>AI is capturing more context earlier in the journey
it's just longer queries. people have always typed long queries when they're frustrated with fees or whatever. now they're calling it some big shift in discovery. honestly, tracking "ai visibility" sounds like another way for agencies to sell useless dashboards that don't show any real revenue. if you can't rank for a specific question about checking accounts, no amount of strategic testing is going to save your client. i doubt these tools even provide anything more than a list of prompts we could have generated ourselves. mostly just marketing speak for the same old brand building stuff.

article: https://www.amsive.com/insights/seo/earn-trust-in-ai-discovery-with-search-social-and-media/